Yes, This Exists: An Indiegogo Campaign For A Luxury Airship RV

Step one should be to figure out how to overcome the helium shortage.

Why even bother reporting on this? One glance could tell you it'll never fly; the proportions are all wrong. Any airship project needs a well-established, experienced airship company supporting it, as well as a marketable, competitive niche and some source of capital. You should report on projects that are really getting off the ground; like the Aeroscraft and the Solar Ship.

@HBillyRufus Simple. Build more helium production facilities. The problem isn't supply, it's production- the plants we use are from the early 20th century, when they could only purify helium from extremely rare wells with concentrations of 5% or more. And the vast majority of Helium wasted today is perfectly recyclable.

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Always defer to facts rather than philosophy.

Pretty fantasy article!

I like one of these too.
Too bad I can only have it in my dreams!

Anylcon, no one ever said that these things don't already exist. Talk to James May, he'll hook you up with a nice, slightly used Caravan Airship. Or you can ask Ron Paul where he leased his ritzy all-first-class air yacht from.
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Always defer to facts rather than philosophy.

I might as well explain why this is so very, very wrong. For one: there is no way an airship so tiny could lift that much. It's physically impossible. The whole POINT of making an airship really big is that their lift increases exponentially with size; an airship merely the size of a house could probably carry a small cabin and a handful of passengers, at best. This is why palatial flying cruise ships- such as the Graf Zeppelin ll- are inevitably very large, not yacht-sized.

Not that small airships can't be fun, of course; they can be a hoot to fly. Just don't expect to have it outfitted with a bar and Jacuzzi. That said, if you hybridize it heavily with an airplane, as the Canadian Solar Ship does, you can actually carry a great deal of stuff in a relatively small package- their 20-meter helium-filled delta-wing model can carry 13,000 pounds of cargo and costs $1 million. The competing De Havilland Beaver bushplane carries only 2,200 pounds and costs $5 million.

That ship, however, gets a full 60% of its lift from the wing. This airship doesn't appear to have anything except static lift holding it up, which at that size is a very good recipe for falling.

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Always defer to facts rather than philosophy.

You guys, and gal, are being overly pessimistic here minus J.James's comment. This is something to look forward to. If he's really serious about it, he has probably found other ways to keep the airship running besides helium.

If you think about the math only 20,000 people would need to donate $25, and only 2,000 people would need to donate $250 to get to $1 million. Those 2k would get a free ride too. That's really not that bad, because there are over 310 million people living in the US. That's only 22,000 people to get the project funded!
He's talking low costs for future consumers. Which $2k airships is really reasonable.

@aerosphere
"You guys, and gal, are being overly pessimistic here minus J.James's comment."

How so? I am probably being the bluntest of us all- there is no way this is even physically possible, for the reasons I outlined, much less is it likely. This seems to be a one-man show. How are they going to handle the production, infrastructure, design, fabrication, staffing, FAA type certification, flight testing and logistic nuances with just $1 million?

There is no way this is anything but a bad joke. Even worse, it distracts from legitimate airship entrepreneurial endeavors that actually deserve funding. The aeroscraft is a terrific example- a high-tech, competitive, infrastructure-free cargo airship design with a 270 foot flying prototype and the full weight of an airship company with 25 years' experience behind it, along with interested businesses, NASA and DARPA. For an example of ingenuity and frugality, look at the Solar Ship- a solar-powered half-bushplane, of which there are three flying prototypes. The prototypes are very cheap, because they are just very small delta-shaped balloons and modified old bushplanes. The bigger ones cost $1 million a pop, and the company just got $2.2 million from the Canadian government to haul supplies to the far north.

To add insult to injury, Solar Ship had its own IndieGoGo fundraiser, also with a $1 million goal, in order to build a Solar Ship to haul medical supplies to deepest Africa- a needed humanitarian mission, as opposed a ludicrous "flying RV." They only raised $11,000.

"This is something to look forward to. If he's really serious about it, he has probably found other ways to keep the airship running besides helium."

Trust me when I tell you that there are no alternatives. Not that the Helium shortage will be a problem for much longer, with plants scheduled to open in Qatar, Russia, Poland, the Rockies and Australia. Hydrogen is illegal on passenger airships, and for good reason.

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Always defer to facts rather than philosophy.

@J. James
I am sorry. I misread who was posting what. You are being realistic.
I see your point that this may not be a project worth supporting in regards to other projects that may have a higher amount of skill set to make such a great concept come true.

@aerosphere
No, it is I that should be sorry. Looking back, I kind of snapped at you. I didn't mean it; I'm just bitter that Solar Ship's humanitarian IndieGoGo campaign received no attention and subsequently flopped, yet this ridiculous insult gets on Popular Science so that people can point and laugh at the concept of an airship revival.
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Always defer to facts rather than philosophy.

@J.James,

It's ok.

You are right. It would be better to continue talking about projects that have a real ambitious crew who has hard driven knowledge about such things as developing an airship, hovercraft, or any other feasible air craft. I do remember that article about the hover bike, that was pretty neat.

Oh well, hope springs eternal...

actually, there are alternatives to helium. it's just that pure hydrogen and helium have the largest buoyancy ratio so that the lesser elements require a larger volume of gas to get airborne. oxyhydrogen, for example, is just separated water molecules. yet the added oxygen decreases the buoyancy of the hydrogen by about two thirds. but oxyhydrogen is super easy and fast to generate, especially if a catalyst is used. and if super-light aluminum were used instead of steel, an acceptable compromise between size, weight, and lift ratio could be obtained. just as the Aeroscraft doesn't use helium exclusively, to generate variable lift, a smaller and lighter craft is possible if proper design methodology with strong and light materials are used. working outside the box, or bag, can get us into the air more permanently. let us all reach for the skies.

:)
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To design a good dirgable airship you need to abandon the 1930's ideas like bicycle wheel skin frames in favor of geodistic frames (Think of a geodistic dome stretched into a dirgable) and reliance on helium (try a bag of hydrogen inside a bag of nitrogen)for lift and heavy fuels like diesel or gasoline (hydrogen anyone?).

A light pressurizable cabin (a fabric bag?) could allow one to fly over bad weather. Radar and GPS would make navigation safer. Radar and satelites could allow you to fly around bad weather.

Water bag sea anchors would allow landings on lakes.